This section provides background information related to the present disclosure which is not necessarily prior art.
A male threaded pipe fitting may fracture within a counterpart female threaded pipe fitting. In such a situation, removal of the male threaded pipe fitting may be difficult. Typically, broken male threaded pipe fittings are extracted using known devices that generally fall into one of three categories:
One known device for extracting a broken male pipe fitting has a conical or tapered configuration, with left-handed helical teeth, or left-hand sharpened (for extracting right-hand threaded fittings), straight-edged teeth or blades which are co-axial with the axis of the tool. The teeth or blades are typically multiple in number, radially disposed, and equally spaced.
A second known device for extracting a broken male pipe fitting has a tapered pyramid or conical fashion, with a triangular, square, pentagonal, hexagonal, or other regular polygon cross-section. The edges along the cross-sectional corners of this pipe extraction device are sharp which enable them to embed into the inside diameter of the fitting to facilitate extraction.
A third known device for extracting a broken male pipe fitting is of the expanding type. This device has straight or knurled teeth along the longitude of its gripping surface, and expands outwardly to cylindrically engage with the inside diameter of the broken pipe fitting when removal (counter-clockwise) torque is applied to the tool.
All of these devices grip the broken male pipe fitting either partially (conically) or entirely (cylindrically) on an inside diameter of the pipe fitting at or near the exposed and broken edge or mouth of the damaged fitting. These tools can be, but are not always successful for extracting broken metallic (steel, brass, iron or aluminum) pipe fittings in order to reclaim the reusable mating part. However, in the case of non-metallic fittings (plastic, PVC, CPVC, Nylon, etc.) these tools often fail to successfully extract the broken male pipe fitting, due to the fact that the tool pressure exerted upon the contact area is so great, that rather than gripping the male pipe fitting, the tool tends to machine or carve the softer plastic materials. Additionally, the increased elasticity of plastic, in particular, PVC pipe fittings tends to work against extraction efforts because these tools expand the fitting, thereby increasing the necessary removal torque. This in turn destroys the broken fitting to the extent that it can no longer be extracted, rendering the previously usable mating female pipe fitting unusable and therefore scrap.
While known tools for extracting a broken male pipe fitting may have proven useful for certain circumstances, a need for improvement in the relevant art exists.